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Lot Essay
A Rare, Important, Shang-dynasty
Owl-Form Zun Wine Vessel
Dating to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–c. 1046 BC) and known in Chinese as a xiaozun, or owl-shaped zun, this exceptionally rare vessel served as a wine-storage or presentation jar and was used in funerary ceremonies honoring the spirit of a deceased ancestor. Though its exact function remains unknown, one can picture it resting majestically on an altar and containing the wine that would be used in the ceremonies. Frequently published, this vessel claims a distinguished provenance, having passed through the hands of Dr. Otto Burchard (1892–1965) and of Maurice Rheims (1910–2003) and having been studied in Kansas City, MO, by bronze specialist Chen Mengjia (1911–1966) in the mid-1940s. Most important of all, however, this xiaozun compares in style and quality to a virtually identical owl-form zun excavated from Xibeigang Tomb 1885 at Anyang, the last Shang capital; moreover, it shows kinship to two owl-form zun vessels excavated from the tomb of Lady Fuhao at Anyang in 1976. That xiaozun vessels of this type were buried in Shang royal tombs not only attests to the importance of this piece but to the high status of the person for whom it was made; in fact, it might have been made for Shang royalty.
This owl zun belongs to a small group of wine-storage or presentation vessels generally classified as shouzun or shouxingzun, meaning “animal-shaped zun vessels”. The best-known such Shang animal-form vessel is arguably the rhinoceros-form zun, or xizun, that was excavated in Shandong province in 1843 and is now in the collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (B60B1+). Other animal-form vessels, all of which are exceptionally rare, include the ram-form gong vessel from the Fujita Museum, Osaka, Japan, that sold at Christie’s, New York, on 14 March 2017 (Lot 526), the elephant-shaped zun vessel in the U.S. National Asian Museum of Asian Art’s Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (F1936.6a-b), and the elephant-form zun in the Musée Guimet, Paris (EO 1545).
Known generically in Chinese as xiao and comprising more than 200 different species, owls are solitary, nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, sharp talons, and feathers adapted for silent flight. They possess a hawk-like hooked beak, a flat face, large, forward-facing eyes, and a conspicuous circle of feathers, termed a facial disc, around each eye. As witnessed by this xiaozun, owls represented on Shang bronzes typically possess the facial disc, permitting ready identification.
The owl was known to the earliest Chinese, who likely admired its stealth, its ability to fly silently, its prowess in hunting at night, and its regal bearing. Though its precise meaning and symbolism in Shang times remain unknown, the owl doubtless played a totemic, tutelary, or talismanic role. A character in the form of a bird resembling an owl appears in both bronze and oracle-bone inscriptions, sparking suggestions that it might have served as a clan sign (also termed a clan insignia and an ancestral lineage emblem) (1).
In fact, Hu Houxuan has argued that the owl was the totem of the Shang people (2). According to the Shijing , or Book of Songs—whose origins date as early as the Shang dynasty—the Shang people descended from a mythical black bird known as the xuanniao, which some scholars have argued must have been an owl. Sun Xinzhou has posited that the Strigidae owl, or true owl, was worshiped in the Shang dynasty and that Di Jun, the mythical Shang ancestor, can be associated with that bird deity (3). The historian and archaeologist Liu Dunyuan has contended that the Shang people perceived the owl as the god of night and dreams as well as the messenger between human and spirit worlds (on account of its silent flight and nocturnal hunting) (4). As Wang Tao has concluded, the belief, if true, that the owl is the messenger between human and spiritual worlds could explain why the owl is repeatedly employed in Shang ritual art and is found in burial contexts (5).
Except for small differences in surface ornamentation, this xiaozun is virtually identical to the owl-form zun excavated from Xibeigang Tomb 1885 at Yinxu, Anyang, Henan province, the last Shang capital, and now in the collection of the Museum of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei (R001074) (6). The excavated example’s cover, long ago lost, was not recovered in the excavations, so the vessels’ heads and faces cannot be compared, though they must have been very similar. The treatment of the feet distinguishes these two xiaozun from other owl-zun vessels, as the talons of these two owls curve downward, as if grasping a branch for support while perched in a tree. By contrast, the feet of other owl-zun vessels 1) are shown flat, as if the bird is standing, as seen in the vessel in the Pillsbury Collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (50.46.116) (7) and in the similar example in the Bliss Collection in the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC (HC.S.1924.03.(B)) (8); 2) are curved and grasping a sphere, as if the bird is standing with each foot placed on a small orb as witnessed by the pair of vessels excavated in 1976 from the tomb of Lady Fuhao at Anyang (9); or 3) appear on the outside faces of square vessel-support blocks, the talons schematically indicated by shallow intaglio lines as evinced by the example in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (1954.48.7a-b) (10). Despite the vessels’ differing treatment of head, body, and feet, the design executed in relief on the breast of the present owl vessel recalls that on the two owl-zun vessels excavated from the tomb of Lady Fuhao; though exact identification remains difficult, the design on the present vessel seems to represent an animal mask presented frontally above one or two ascending snakes.
A principal wife of Shang-dynasty King Wu Ding (r. c. 1250–c. 1192 BC), Lady Fu Hao was a powerful figure who gave birth to a royal prince and served as a military leader, apparently leading troops into battle. That zun vessels of this type were buried in her tomb—along with 2,000 other luxury items including some 468 bronzes—attests to the importance of such vessels. As they bear an inscription with her name, the pair of owl-zun vessels found in her tomb are assumed to have been cast around 1200 BC, shortly after her death and specifically for burial in her tomb. The similarity in style and decoration of the present xiaozun to the one excavated from Xibeigang Tomb M1885 at Anyang and to the two excavated from the Anyang tomb of Lady Fuhao suggests that all four vessels were made in the same place (presumably in Anyang, Henan province), at roughly the same time in the late Shang period—likely in the late thirteenth to early twelfth century BC—and perhaps even in the same workshop.
In his succinct discussion of the evolution and development of the owl zun, Robert Bagley notes that the earliest such Shang vessels, as witnessed by the previously mentioned Pillsbury example, tend to be more naturalistic, while later Shang vessels, such as the Yale University example, tend to be more stylized (11). He further notes that due to the consolidation of the wings and tail into a single, downward sweeping arc, the present vessel is more streamlined and thus more naturalistic and dynamic than both earlier and later examples.
Like many important Shang ritual bronzes, this owl zun includes a short inscription—in this case, a one-character inscription—that appears on underside of the vessel in the area between the feet and the tail. Now difficult to read because of recent damage and repair to the vessel, the character, or graph, is well-preserved in ink rubbings taken in earlier decades (12). It represents a standing quadruped; a single horn issues from the animal’s forehead, as noted by the renowned early-bronze specialist Chen Mengjia (1911–1966) , who examined the zun first-hand in Kansas City, MO, during his 1944–1947 travels in the U.S., when it was on loan to the Nelson Gallery of Art (subsequently renamed the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) (13); at that time Chen photographed the zun, made an ink rubbing of its inscription, stated his belief that it came from Anyang, and noted that it had not been repaired or restored (14). The single horn suggests that the animal might be a rhinoceros, an animal known in Shang times and considered to be auspicious (15), as evinced by the previously mentioned rhinoceros-form zun, or xizun, in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum (B60B1+). The graph is assumed to be a clan sign —also termed a totem, clan insignia, and ancestral lineage emblem. The closely related owl zun excavated from Xibeigang Tomb 1885 at Anyang also claims a single-character inscription on its underside, the graph likely representing a tiger (16).
Once in the Qing Imperial Collection, a related though slightly smaller owl zun is published in the 1793 Xi Qing xujian jiabian, one of the catalogues of Emperor Qianlong’s collection of antiquities (17). The catalogue’s woodblock-printed line drawing of the bronze is too schematic to permit a close comparison with the present vessel; even so, the two vessels share the same shape and general appearance, and in each case the bird’s head and neck comprise the removable cover. The Qianlong catalogue illustration does not picture the owl’s feet, suggesting that they were missing, nor does it give any indication that the vessel had an inscription, so those features cannot be compared. According to the dimensions listed in the Xi Qing xujian jiabian catalogue, the Qianlong-collection bronze was smaller than the present example. The catalogue incorrectly ascribes it to the Zhou dynasty and terms it a jizun, or chicken zun (though that term might be more appropriately rendered as a bird-shaped, or fowl-shaped, zun).
During the Shang dynasty, the Anyang bronze foundries typically cast in advance vessel handles and other protruding elements—the legs and feet, in the case of this owl zun and that from Xibeigang Tomb 1885—and then placed those pre-cast elements in the vessel-casting mould before it was assembled and readied for casting the vessel itself (a technique termed “casting on”). When the molten bronze was poured into the mould to cast the vessel, the so-called cast-on elements were fused into the vessel and became integral with it. In some instances—though not always so—such cast-on elements were susceptible to damage and loss, which might account for the lack of legs on the owl zun depicted in the Qianlong-collection catalogue.
Apart from the owl-zun vessels previously mentioned, additional closely related xiaozun vessels include those in the U.S. National Museum of Asian Art’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (S1987.1a-b) (18), in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A M.5-1, 2-1935) (19), in the Sumitomo Collection at the Sen-oku Hakuko Kan, Kyoto (20), and in the Art Institute of Chicago (1936.139) (21), among a few others.
In addition to owl-zun vessels, there are also Shang owl-you vessels, called xiaoyou, which are covered, wine containers, usually with a bail handle, and which feature two addorsed owls—i.e., two owls set back-to-back—as seen in examples in the British Museum, London (1936,1118.4) (22), and in the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (1943.52.102) (23). Moreover, an owl is typically paired with a tiger in those covered, wine-pouring vessels known as gong, the tiger featured at the front and the owl at the back, as witnessed by the famous Luboshez gong that sold at Christie’s, New York, on 18 March 2021 (Lot 505). Other wine vessels in more standard shapes—particularly jia, zhi, and fangyi vessels—occasionally feature the face of an owl as the principal decorative motif, the bird’s distinctive facial discs commanding immediate attention, as evinced by the famous fangjia formerly in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and now in the collection of Compton Verney, Oxfordshire, U.K. (CVCSC 0365.1-2.A) (24), the fangyi in the Meiyintang collection, Zurich (25), the zhi in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (1988.20.1) (26), and the similar zhi in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum (B60 B3+). Rather than columnar legs, a few ding food vessels claim tall, flat legs—sometimes termed blade legs—each in the form of a standing owl, and a few jia vessels sport owl-form finials atop the vertical posts, or pillars, that rise from their lips. Moreover, both jade pendants and marble sculptures of owls have been recovered from Shang tombs, the most famous such marble sculpture being that excavated from Xibeigang Tomb M1001 at Anyang (27); the Shang marble sculptures of owls show kinship to the contemporaneous owl-form zun vessels. Thus, even if less frequently encountered than the taotie mask, the owl nonetheless played a prominent role in the arts of the Shang dynasty.
This rare owl-form vessel was first published by eminent bronze specialist Chen Mengjia (1911–1966) in the original, 1962 version of his compendium of Shang and Zhou bronzes in American collections. Chen had traveled in the U.S. between 1944 and 1947, compiling a record of early Chinese bronzes collected in America and taking ink rubbings of their inscriptions, supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and, later, from C.T. Loo (1880–1957). During that period, Chen studied the present xiaozun in Kansas City, MO, where it was in on loan to the Nelson Gallery of Art (though as Chen noted, it belonged to art dealer Dr. Otto Burchard (1892–1965), documenting that the vessel had left China by the mid-1940s, possibly carried by Burchard himself in the late 1920s or early ’30s or, perhaps more likely, in 1946, when he and his wife moved from Beijing to New York. Chen completed the book manuscript and submitted it to Harvard University for publication in 1947, the same year he returned to China. Due to various reasons, preparations for publication moved slowly, then, after Harvard lost contact with Chen in the 1950s, publication was cancelled. Even so, the book eventually appeared in China in 1962 under the title Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists, edited by the Chinese Institute of Archaeology and published by the Science Press, but it enjoyed only limited circulation, so scholars today usually consult the 1977 Japanese reprint of the book, which credits Chen Mengjia as author and features his original title, A Corpus of Yin and Zhou Bronzes in American Collections. However, as the original, 1962 edition of the book is not generally available in libraries, some scholars mistakenly assume that Chen’s book was first published in 1977; they thus fail to understand the importance of Chen’s work in documenting that this xiaozun was already in the U.S. in the mid-1940s. In that context, it is important to note that Chen traveled in the U.S. in the mid-1940s, that he saw and recorded this xiaozun at that time, that he had completed the book manuscript by 1947, and that the book was first published in 1962, as it is this compendium that attests that this rare bronze had left China and was already in the U.S. by the mid-1940s.
In terms of provenance, this owl-form zun was most recently in the collection of Maurice Rheims (1910–2003), a famous French art dealer, collector, and long-time chief auctioneer at the Hôtel Drouot, the venerable Paris auction house. An acquaintance of Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), President of France from 1959 until his retirement in 1969, and a learned man of many and varied talents, Rheims was a prolific author, with authoritative monographs on Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1861–1901), and Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465–1525/26), not to mention, with scholarly works as well on French sculpture and porcelain, Roman silver, and many others. Clever and very witty, Rheims penned several novels, founded the art journal Connaissance des Arts, and compiled Dictionnaire des mots sauvages, a vast, learned assembly of unusual, difficult, and arcane words found in the works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. He considered his 1976 election to the Académie française and his 1979 appointment as a commander of the French Légion d’honneur to be two of his crowning achievements (28).
A contemporary and close friend of André Malraux (1901–1976)—French novelist, art theorist, and Minister of Cultural Affairs (1958–1969)—Maurice Rheims lent his precious owl zun to the tribute exhibition titled “André Malraux”, which featured more than 200 works of art from all corners of the globe and from all chronological periods. The exhibition was on view at the Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul, France, from 13 July to 30 September 1973. This xiaozun is published in the exhibition catalogue (29) as well as in Rheims’ 1973 Le Point article on the exhibition (30).
Before passing into the hands of Maurice Rheims, presumably in the 1950s or early 1960s, this xiaozun vessel had belonged to Dr. Otto Burchard (1892–1965), a well-known art dealer and collector who was active in China, Europe, and the United States in the early and mid-twentieth century. In the 1910s, Burchard, who was born in Mainz, Germany, developed a passion for Chinese art, a passion that took him to the University of Leipzig, where he earned a doctorate, writing a thesis on Chinese painting (31). In 1917 he moved to Berlin, where he opened an art gallery in 1920. Achieving fame in Summer 1920 as the host of the International Dada Fair, the most prominent event of the avant-garde Berlin Dada movement (32), he was duly honored with the grand-but-unofficial title of “Generaldada, Exzellenz”, or “His Excellency, General Dada”.
Burchard frequently traveled to China in the early 1920s, acquiring archaic bronzes and jades, Buddhist sculptures, early ceramics, and fine paintings which he sold to museums and private collectors in the U.S. and Europe. In 1932 he and his wife relocated to Beijing, then known as Peking, where he became known as a connoisseur of considerable reputation. He and his wife continued to live in China until 1946, when they settled first in New York and later in Jegenstorf, near Bern, in Switzerland, where he passed away in 1965. During all those years he sold works of art, mainly Chinese but also some European works, sometimes directly to clients but often through intermediaries.
With a passion for early Chinese art, a degree in sinology, and a thesis on Chinese painting, Burchard had an eye for quality and talent as a collector and salesman. Among the numerous important works of Chinese art that passed through his hands are an Early Western Zhou bronze gui ritual food vessel in the U.S. National Museum of Asian Art’s Freer Gallery, Washington, DC (F1938.20) (33), the renowned, Warring States-period, ritual jade bi disc with dragons striding around its periphery in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (33-81) (34) , the celebrated Southern Song painting by Ma Yuan (c. 1160–1125) depicting “Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing” , in the Nelson-Atkins Museum (63-19) (35), the acclaimed pair of Ming dragon-emblazoned meiping vases from the Xuande period (1426–1435) also in the Nelson-Atkins Museum (40-45/1-2) (36), and the exquisite Tang, gilt bronze sculpture of a Seated Bodhisattva in the St. Louis Museum of Art (36:1933) (37).
Often published, this rare owl-form vessel has a long and distinguished pedigree that establishes that it was in the U.S. by the mid-1940s. Moreover, with kinship to zun vessels of similar form from two different Shang-dynasty royal tombs, this xiaozun rightly takes its place among the important bronzes of the late Shang period. It truly is a rare treasure.
Robert D. Mowry
Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art Emeritus,
Harvard Art Museums, and
Senior Consultant, Christie’s
Owl-Form Zun Wine Vessel
Dating to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–c. 1046 BC) and known in Chinese as a xiaozun, or owl-shaped zun, this exceptionally rare vessel served as a wine-storage or presentation jar and was used in funerary ceremonies honoring the spirit of a deceased ancestor. Though its exact function remains unknown, one can picture it resting majestically on an altar and containing the wine that would be used in the ceremonies. Frequently published, this vessel claims a distinguished provenance, having passed through the hands of Dr. Otto Burchard (1892–1965) and of Maurice Rheims (1910–2003) and having been studied in Kansas City, MO, by bronze specialist Chen Mengjia (1911–1966) in the mid-1940s. Most important of all, however, this xiaozun compares in style and quality to a virtually identical owl-form zun excavated from Xibeigang Tomb 1885 at Anyang, the last Shang capital; moreover, it shows kinship to two owl-form zun vessels excavated from the tomb of Lady Fuhao at Anyang in 1976. That xiaozun vessels of this type were buried in Shang royal tombs not only attests to the importance of this piece but to the high status of the person for whom it was made; in fact, it might have been made for Shang royalty.
This owl zun belongs to a small group of wine-storage or presentation vessels generally classified as shouzun or shouxingzun, meaning “animal-shaped zun vessels”. The best-known such Shang animal-form vessel is arguably the rhinoceros-form zun, or xizun, that was excavated in Shandong province in 1843 and is now in the collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (B60B1+). Other animal-form vessels, all of which are exceptionally rare, include the ram-form gong vessel from the Fujita Museum, Osaka, Japan, that sold at Christie’s, New York, on 14 March 2017 (Lot 526), the elephant-shaped zun vessel in the U.S. National Asian Museum of Asian Art’s Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (F1936.6a-b), and the elephant-form zun in the Musée Guimet, Paris (EO 1545).
Known generically in Chinese as xiao and comprising more than 200 different species, owls are solitary, nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, sharp talons, and feathers adapted for silent flight. They possess a hawk-like hooked beak, a flat face, large, forward-facing eyes, and a conspicuous circle of feathers, termed a facial disc, around each eye. As witnessed by this xiaozun, owls represented on Shang bronzes typically possess the facial disc, permitting ready identification.
The owl was known to the earliest Chinese, who likely admired its stealth, its ability to fly silently, its prowess in hunting at night, and its regal bearing. Though its precise meaning and symbolism in Shang times remain unknown, the owl doubtless played a totemic, tutelary, or talismanic role. A character in the form of a bird resembling an owl appears in both bronze and oracle-bone inscriptions, sparking suggestions that it might have served as a clan sign (also termed a clan insignia and an ancestral lineage emblem) (1).
In fact, Hu Houxuan has argued that the owl was the totem of the Shang people (2). According to the Shijing , or Book of Songs—whose origins date as early as the Shang dynasty—the Shang people descended from a mythical black bird known as the xuanniao, which some scholars have argued must have been an owl. Sun Xinzhou has posited that the Strigidae owl, or true owl, was worshiped in the Shang dynasty and that Di Jun, the mythical Shang ancestor, can be associated with that bird deity (3). The historian and archaeologist Liu Dunyuan has contended that the Shang people perceived the owl as the god of night and dreams as well as the messenger between human and spirit worlds (on account of its silent flight and nocturnal hunting) (4). As Wang Tao has concluded, the belief, if true, that the owl is the messenger between human and spiritual worlds could explain why the owl is repeatedly employed in Shang ritual art and is found in burial contexts (5).
Except for small differences in surface ornamentation, this xiaozun is virtually identical to the owl-form zun excavated from Xibeigang Tomb 1885 at Yinxu, Anyang, Henan province, the last Shang capital, and now in the collection of the Museum of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei (R001074) (6). The excavated example’s cover, long ago lost, was not recovered in the excavations, so the vessels’ heads and faces cannot be compared, though they must have been very similar. The treatment of the feet distinguishes these two xiaozun from other owl-zun vessels, as the talons of these two owls curve downward, as if grasping a branch for support while perched in a tree. By contrast, the feet of other owl-zun vessels 1) are shown flat, as if the bird is standing, as seen in the vessel in the Pillsbury Collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (50.46.116) (7) and in the similar example in the Bliss Collection in the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC (HC.S.1924.03.(B)) (8); 2) are curved and grasping a sphere, as if the bird is standing with each foot placed on a small orb as witnessed by the pair of vessels excavated in 1976 from the tomb of Lady Fuhao at Anyang (9); or 3) appear on the outside faces of square vessel-support blocks, the talons schematically indicated by shallow intaglio lines as evinced by the example in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (1954.48.7a-b) (10). Despite the vessels’ differing treatment of head, body, and feet, the design executed in relief on the breast of the present owl vessel recalls that on the two owl-zun vessels excavated from the tomb of Lady Fuhao; though exact identification remains difficult, the design on the present vessel seems to represent an animal mask presented frontally above one or two ascending snakes.
A principal wife of Shang-dynasty King Wu Ding (r. c. 1250–c. 1192 BC), Lady Fu Hao was a powerful figure who gave birth to a royal prince and served as a military leader, apparently leading troops into battle. That zun vessels of this type were buried in her tomb—along with 2,000 other luxury items including some 468 bronzes—attests to the importance of such vessels. As they bear an inscription with her name, the pair of owl-zun vessels found in her tomb are assumed to have been cast around 1200 BC, shortly after her death and specifically for burial in her tomb. The similarity in style and decoration of the present xiaozun to the one excavated from Xibeigang Tomb M1885 at Anyang and to the two excavated from the Anyang tomb of Lady Fuhao suggests that all four vessels were made in the same place (presumably in Anyang, Henan province), at roughly the same time in the late Shang period—likely in the late thirteenth to early twelfth century BC—and perhaps even in the same workshop.
In his succinct discussion of the evolution and development of the owl zun, Robert Bagley notes that the earliest such Shang vessels, as witnessed by the previously mentioned Pillsbury example, tend to be more naturalistic, while later Shang vessels, such as the Yale University example, tend to be more stylized (11). He further notes that due to the consolidation of the wings and tail into a single, downward sweeping arc, the present vessel is more streamlined and thus more naturalistic and dynamic than both earlier and later examples.
Like many important Shang ritual bronzes, this owl zun includes a short inscription—in this case, a one-character inscription—that appears on underside of the vessel in the area between the feet and the tail. Now difficult to read because of recent damage and repair to the vessel, the character, or graph, is well-preserved in ink rubbings taken in earlier decades (12). It represents a standing quadruped; a single horn issues from the animal’s forehead, as noted by the renowned early-bronze specialist Chen Mengjia (1911–1966) , who examined the zun first-hand in Kansas City, MO, during his 1944–1947 travels in the U.S., when it was on loan to the Nelson Gallery of Art (subsequently renamed the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) (13); at that time Chen photographed the zun, made an ink rubbing of its inscription, stated his belief that it came from Anyang, and noted that it had not been repaired or restored (14). The single horn suggests that the animal might be a rhinoceros, an animal known in Shang times and considered to be auspicious (15), as evinced by the previously mentioned rhinoceros-form zun, or xizun, in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum (B60B1+). The graph is assumed to be a clan sign —also termed a totem, clan insignia, and ancestral lineage emblem. The closely related owl zun excavated from Xibeigang Tomb 1885 at Anyang also claims a single-character inscription on its underside, the graph likely representing a tiger (16).
Once in the Qing Imperial Collection, a related though slightly smaller owl zun is published in the 1793 Xi Qing xujian jiabian, one of the catalogues of Emperor Qianlong’s collection of antiquities (17). The catalogue’s woodblock-printed line drawing of the bronze is too schematic to permit a close comparison with the present vessel; even so, the two vessels share the same shape and general appearance, and in each case the bird’s head and neck comprise the removable cover. The Qianlong catalogue illustration does not picture the owl’s feet, suggesting that they were missing, nor does it give any indication that the vessel had an inscription, so those features cannot be compared. According to the dimensions listed in the Xi Qing xujian jiabian catalogue, the Qianlong-collection bronze was smaller than the present example. The catalogue incorrectly ascribes it to the Zhou dynasty and terms it a jizun, or chicken zun (though that term might be more appropriately rendered as a bird-shaped, or fowl-shaped, zun).
During the Shang dynasty, the Anyang bronze foundries typically cast in advance vessel handles and other protruding elements—the legs and feet, in the case of this owl zun and that from Xibeigang Tomb 1885—and then placed those pre-cast elements in the vessel-casting mould before it was assembled and readied for casting the vessel itself (a technique termed “casting on”). When the molten bronze was poured into the mould to cast the vessel, the so-called cast-on elements were fused into the vessel and became integral with it. In some instances—though not always so—such cast-on elements were susceptible to damage and loss, which might account for the lack of legs on the owl zun depicted in the Qianlong-collection catalogue.
Apart from the owl-zun vessels previously mentioned, additional closely related xiaozun vessels include those in the U.S. National Museum of Asian Art’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (S1987.1a-b) (18), in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A M.5-1, 2-1935) (19), in the Sumitomo Collection at the Sen-oku Hakuko Kan, Kyoto (20), and in the Art Institute of Chicago (1936.139) (21), among a few others.
In addition to owl-zun vessels, there are also Shang owl-you vessels, called xiaoyou, which are covered, wine containers, usually with a bail handle, and which feature two addorsed owls—i.e., two owls set back-to-back—as seen in examples in the British Museum, London (1936,1118.4) (22), and in the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (1943.52.102) (23). Moreover, an owl is typically paired with a tiger in those covered, wine-pouring vessels known as gong, the tiger featured at the front and the owl at the back, as witnessed by the famous Luboshez gong that sold at Christie’s, New York, on 18 March 2021 (Lot 505). Other wine vessels in more standard shapes—particularly jia, zhi, and fangyi vessels—occasionally feature the face of an owl as the principal decorative motif, the bird’s distinctive facial discs commanding immediate attention, as evinced by the famous fangjia formerly in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and now in the collection of Compton Verney, Oxfordshire, U.K. (CVCSC 0365.1-2.A) (24), the fangyi in the Meiyintang collection, Zurich (25), the zhi in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (1988.20.1) (26), and the similar zhi in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum (B60 B3+). Rather than columnar legs, a few ding food vessels claim tall, flat legs—sometimes termed blade legs—each in the form of a standing owl, and a few jia vessels sport owl-form finials atop the vertical posts, or pillars, that rise from their lips. Moreover, both jade pendants and marble sculptures of owls have been recovered from Shang tombs, the most famous such marble sculpture being that excavated from Xibeigang Tomb M1001 at Anyang (27); the Shang marble sculptures of owls show kinship to the contemporaneous owl-form zun vessels. Thus, even if less frequently encountered than the taotie mask, the owl nonetheless played a prominent role in the arts of the Shang dynasty.
This rare owl-form vessel was first published by eminent bronze specialist Chen Mengjia (1911–1966) in the original, 1962 version of his compendium of Shang and Zhou bronzes in American collections. Chen had traveled in the U.S. between 1944 and 1947, compiling a record of early Chinese bronzes collected in America and taking ink rubbings of their inscriptions, supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and, later, from C.T. Loo (1880–1957). During that period, Chen studied the present xiaozun in Kansas City, MO, where it was in on loan to the Nelson Gallery of Art (though as Chen noted, it belonged to art dealer Dr. Otto Burchard (1892–1965), documenting that the vessel had left China by the mid-1940s, possibly carried by Burchard himself in the late 1920s or early ’30s or, perhaps more likely, in 1946, when he and his wife moved from Beijing to New York. Chen completed the book manuscript and submitted it to Harvard University for publication in 1947, the same year he returned to China. Due to various reasons, preparations for publication moved slowly, then, after Harvard lost contact with Chen in the 1950s, publication was cancelled. Even so, the book eventually appeared in China in 1962 under the title Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists, edited by the Chinese Institute of Archaeology and published by the Science Press, but it enjoyed only limited circulation, so scholars today usually consult the 1977 Japanese reprint of the book, which credits Chen Mengjia as author and features his original title, A Corpus of Yin and Zhou Bronzes in American Collections. However, as the original, 1962 edition of the book is not generally available in libraries, some scholars mistakenly assume that Chen’s book was first published in 1977; they thus fail to understand the importance of Chen’s work in documenting that this xiaozun was already in the U.S. in the mid-1940s. In that context, it is important to note that Chen traveled in the U.S. in the mid-1940s, that he saw and recorded this xiaozun at that time, that he had completed the book manuscript by 1947, and that the book was first published in 1962, as it is this compendium that attests that this rare bronze had left China and was already in the U.S. by the mid-1940s.
In terms of provenance, this owl-form zun was most recently in the collection of Maurice Rheims (1910–2003), a famous French art dealer, collector, and long-time chief auctioneer at the Hôtel Drouot, the venerable Paris auction house. An acquaintance of Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), President of France from 1959 until his retirement in 1969, and a learned man of many and varied talents, Rheims was a prolific author, with authoritative monographs on Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1861–1901), and Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465–1525/26), not to mention, with scholarly works as well on French sculpture and porcelain, Roman silver, and many others. Clever and very witty, Rheims penned several novels, founded the art journal Connaissance des Arts, and compiled Dictionnaire des mots sauvages, a vast, learned assembly of unusual, difficult, and arcane words found in the works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. He considered his 1976 election to the Académie française and his 1979 appointment as a commander of the French Légion d’honneur to be two of his crowning achievements (28).
A contemporary and close friend of André Malraux (1901–1976)—French novelist, art theorist, and Minister of Cultural Affairs (1958–1969)—Maurice Rheims lent his precious owl zun to the tribute exhibition titled “André Malraux”, which featured more than 200 works of art from all corners of the globe and from all chronological periods. The exhibition was on view at the Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul, France, from 13 July to 30 September 1973. This xiaozun is published in the exhibition catalogue (29) as well as in Rheims’ 1973 Le Point article on the exhibition (30).
Before passing into the hands of Maurice Rheims, presumably in the 1950s or early 1960s, this xiaozun vessel had belonged to Dr. Otto Burchard (1892–1965), a well-known art dealer and collector who was active in China, Europe, and the United States in the early and mid-twentieth century. In the 1910s, Burchard, who was born in Mainz, Germany, developed a passion for Chinese art, a passion that took him to the University of Leipzig, where he earned a doctorate, writing a thesis on Chinese painting (31). In 1917 he moved to Berlin, where he opened an art gallery in 1920. Achieving fame in Summer 1920 as the host of the International Dada Fair, the most prominent event of the avant-garde Berlin Dada movement (32), he was duly honored with the grand-but-unofficial title of “Generaldada, Exzellenz”, or “His Excellency, General Dada”.
Burchard frequently traveled to China in the early 1920s, acquiring archaic bronzes and jades, Buddhist sculptures, early ceramics, and fine paintings which he sold to museums and private collectors in the U.S. and Europe. In 1932 he and his wife relocated to Beijing, then known as Peking, where he became known as a connoisseur of considerable reputation. He and his wife continued to live in China until 1946, when they settled first in New York and later in Jegenstorf, near Bern, in Switzerland, where he passed away in 1965. During all those years he sold works of art, mainly Chinese but also some European works, sometimes directly to clients but often through intermediaries.
With a passion for early Chinese art, a degree in sinology, and a thesis on Chinese painting, Burchard had an eye for quality and talent as a collector and salesman. Among the numerous important works of Chinese art that passed through his hands are an Early Western Zhou bronze gui ritual food vessel in the U.S. National Museum of Asian Art’s Freer Gallery, Washington, DC (F1938.20) (33), the renowned, Warring States-period, ritual jade bi disc with dragons striding around its periphery in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (33-81) (34) , the celebrated Southern Song painting by Ma Yuan (c. 1160–1125) depicting “Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing” , in the Nelson-Atkins Museum (63-19) (35), the acclaimed pair of Ming dragon-emblazoned meiping vases from the Xuande period (1426–1435) also in the Nelson-Atkins Museum (40-45/1-2) (36), and the exquisite Tang, gilt bronze sculpture of a Seated Bodhisattva in the St. Louis Museum of Art (36:1933) (37).
Often published, this rare owl-form vessel has a long and distinguished pedigree that establishes that it was in the U.S. by the mid-1940s. Moreover, with kinship to zun vessels of similar form from two different Shang-dynasty royal tombs, this xiaozun rightly takes its place among the important bronzes of the late Shang period. It truly is a rare treasure.
Robert D. Mowry
Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art Emeritus,
Harvard Art Museums, and
Senior Consultant, Christie’s